of NA
59© The Author(s) 2020
G. Stevenson, Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47760-8_3
CHAPTER 3
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg andTheir
Transcendentalist Gloom
The LosT GeneraTion Mark ii
Like Henry Miller, the Beat Generation is inseparable from the zeitgeist
that made it famous. The names Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg—and
to a lesser extent William Burroughs—bring to mind youth rebellion in
the late 1950s and 1960s, bohemian road tripping across the American
continent, risqué and liberating poetry readings in San Francisco and the
heroic artistic origins of a rebirth in social and cultural ideas. Jack Kerouac’s
slogan-friendly homage in On the Road to people who are ‘mad to talk,
mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time’ sums up a group
image that has endured not only in popular but in artistic and scholarly
circles ever since(2011, p.7). From the moment the Beats came to wide-
spread public recognition—1957, when Ginsberg’s cult fame for reading
‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery was eclipsed by On the Road’s storming of the
New York Times bestseller list—they were associated with ecstasy, romance
and redemption. Unsurprisingly, elements of the popular press and of the
literary establishment worried about the decadent example they were set-
ting to young people. But for those on board, this movement went down
in cultural history as a progressive break with the old and explosion of
the new.
Ginsberg, who lived the longest and was always more interested in
securing the Beat brand, spent the last thirty years of his life retelling a
legend about how he and his friends began by ghting to determine their
own destinies and ended up determining a whole generation’s. Unlike
60
Kerouac—who bristled under the spotlight—Ginsberg was eager to oblige
journalists, academics and stars of successive countercultures by conrm-
ing the social and artistic legacy the Beats had left. In print and TV inter-
views, in his own essays, in prefaces for reissues and anthologies of Beat
work, at marches against the Vietnam War, and through collaborations
with Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and The Clash, Ginsberg made sure the
world would not forget that his, Kerouac and Burroughs’ rebellion had
been the catalyst. These, as he put it tearfully in a documentary on Dylan,
were proof that the ‘torch had been passed’ to generations who had ‘lis-
tened well’ (Scorsese 2005). In political terms, Ginsberg wrote in his pref-
ace to Kerouac’s posthumously published Visions of Cody, the hippy spirit
was directly and nobly descended from the Beats: ‘peace protester adoles-
cents from Cherry High with neck kiss bruises sit & weep on Denver
Capitol Hill lawn, hundreds of Neal & Jack souls mortal lamblike sighing
over the nation now, 1972’ (Kerouac 2012a, p.1). For his part, Kerouac
had no time for what Ginsberg had made of the movement, appearing
dishevelled on French TV in the year of his death to decry the ‘bohemians’
who ‘came along with their sandals and long hair and just sat watching us’
(Kerouac 1959).
If Ginsberg provided the face, the sound bites and even the lectures
(administered from a faculty he helped set up in Kerouac’s name), it was
and still is Kerouac who dened the Beat tone.
1
On the Road didn’t only
launch the movement; its peon to the idealism of youth, to transient over
sedentary living and to romantic hope for a world dened by the spirit
rather than reasoned responsibility became as emblematic of that cultural
moment as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby had been to the Lost Generation
and the Jazz Age. When—like Fitzgerald—Kerouac ended up prematurely
old then dead from alcoholism in his forties, he entered folklore as a tragic
symbol of talent wasted, a movement betrayed by base, corporate inter-
ests, or a Van Gogh gure too sensitive and visionary for the material
world. And yet, despite Ginsberg’s efforts to deny it—and despite the joie
de vivre associated with On the Road from the 1950s to the present day—
the fatalism that led Kerouac to destroy himself had been integral to the
school from the outset. It was there in their thinking, reading and writing
as they came of age at Columbia in the 1940s, and is an important but
frequently neglected part of their story.
G. STEVENSON
61
a FascinaTion wiTheviL
The Beat behind what became the swinging 1960s had its origins in the
gloom of mid-Winter NewYork and the thick of the Second World War.
Though its major players read Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau and Blake, it
emerged in the rst place out of an intellectual atmosphere permeated by
talk of n de siècle a-moralism rather than Romantic optimism. As we’ll
see, Ginsberg felt a spiritual afnity with Blake from a young age, and he
came to imagine and present himself as a twentieth-century answer to
Walt Whitman. Likewise, Kerouac’s decision to write rst-person epic
prose was part of his romantic ambition to succeed talismanic Americans
like Herman Melville, Jack London and—emphatically—Thomas Wolfe.
But their romantic impulse in the early years was directed more towards
the annihilation of consciousness than an active engagement with self,
nature or nation.
College students restless for real-life action, Ginsberg and Kerouac met
the more worldly Burroughs for the rst time in and around campus—at
Greenwich Village dive bars and bedsits and at late-night drugstores on
Times Square. It was the coming together of their idealisms with his dry,
wilfully perverse attention to ‘the facts’ that made the movement so ripe
for their disenchanted post-war age.
2
For both of them, Burroughs and his
Louisiana friends Lucien Carr and David Kammerer were a breath of
intoxicatingbohemian air on a university literary scene in which philoso-
phies of art and life were read about but rarely practised. The precocious
Ginsberg turned up at Columbia aged only seventeen and was immedi-
ately in thrall to his classmate Carr, a boy from old southern money who
showed him Rimbaud, André Gide and a way not only to read these poets
but to live provocatively according to their creeds. Four years older,
already dropped out from college and back in town after a year away in the
merchant navy, Kerouac was nonetheless just as taken with what he later
called ‘this here new New Orleans School’ (Kerouac 2012b, p.193).
Before any mention of ‘beat’ or the road, and before either had met
their car-jacking, cowboy muse Neal Cassady and set out forthe American
heartland, it was this strange new social set that rst convinced Kerouac or
Ginsberg that a literary Renaissance in the mid-twentieth century was pos-
sible. Remembered wistfully by Kerouac as ‘the most evil and intelligent
buncha bastards and shits in America’, they were a rag-tag set held together
by their youngest member, Carr (Kerouac 2012b, p. 193). Carr knew
Kammerer from his childhood in Louisiana—when the older man had
3 JACK KEROUAC, ALLEN GINSBERG AND THEIR TRANSCENDENTALIST GLOOM
62
been his scout leader and had developed a sinister-tragic obsession with
him. Kammerer and Burroughs were friends from the same town, and
when Kammerer moved to NewYork to be closer to Carr at Columbia,
Burroughs—then bumming around a few years out of Harvard—decided
to join. Kammerer’s desperate, clumsy pursuit of and eventual murder by
a young man he had groomed from fourteen is closer to Humbert
Humbert and Lolita than Rimbaud and Verlaine, but it appears in
Kerouac’s, Ginsberg’s and many subsequent Beat historical accounts as
the ultimate real-life expression of the aesthetic theories the group were
experimenting with.
3
The most extreme of their many sordid and dramatic
foundational stories, it remains symptomatic of a fascination with and
fatalism about human evil that underscored the Beat mission.
We’ll see that that fascination was deeper seated in Kerouac than
Ginsberg, mainly as a result of his Catholic upbringing and ambition to
fuse Christian theology and Symbolism with artistic vision. But it dened
both of their formative educations in NewYork in the 1940s. If the aes-
thete Carr provided a rst inspiration—the rst words in an evolving man-
ifesto for a ‘New Vision’—the then thirty-three-year-old Burroughs
helped them to rene their pre-Beat artistic-moral worldview. Under
Burroughs’ idiosyncratic professorial inuence (he was nine years older
than Kerouac and twelve than Ginsberg, but his manner suggested an
even bigger difference), they grappled with the theories of philosophy,
psychoanalysis and history that informed the Symbolist poetry Carr had
put them on to. Burroughs also schooled them on the modernist works
popular among young literary types but not yet taught on the Columbia
curriculum—Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913), Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
and, of course, a censored autobiographical novel called Tropic of Cancer
by the then little-known Henry Miller (1934).
ideaLisM versus FaTaLisM
Late-night sessions at Burroughs’ apartment involved a lot of drink, ‘tea’
and uppers but also schoolmasterly drawled disquisitions on Nietzsche,
Goethe, Freud and Freud’s fashionable new acolyte Wilhelm Reich. In a
voice Kerouac described as ‘dry, new to me’—and decked out improbably
in the stiff suit, tie and trilby hat that remained his uniform throughout his
career—Burroughs made a show of disabusing his young friends of their
‘picked up Idealism’ (Kerouac 2012b, p. 193). As we heard in the
G. STEVENSON
63
previous chapter, of the writers Burroughs recommended it was Céline
(and later, Jean Genet) whose use of language represented the most
extreme form of that anti-idealism. Their spat, brazen obscenities—
repeated in American by Henry Miller in the 1930s—had a strong bearing
on Ginsberg’s loosening of his form and his tongue, his discovery like
them that profanity could induce spiritual purgation. In the coming pages,
that strategy—and the pose of fatalism it involves—will be discussed, par-
ticularly as a development of Miller’s own and of what this reveals about
the transition from modernism to the counterculture. More important
though, the emancipatory project Kerouac and Ginsberg ended up spear-
heading was grounded rst of all, and, in earnest, in the prophecy of civili-
sational decline put forward by German historian Oswald Spengler.
By Kerouac’s account, Spengler’s The Decline of the West was one of the
rst names on Burroughs’ impromptu salon-reading list. Looking back
fondly in Vanity of Duluoz he remembers his friend thrusting a copy into
his hands and telling him, grandfather-like, to ‘EEE di fy your mind, my
boy, with the grand actuality of FACT’ (p.196). By Ginsberg’s, that hand-
ing down of Spengler was ceremonial—a kick-start to the backpack revo-
lution that began with them and reverberated across the generations.
4
Intended as a hybrid of Nietzsche’s method and Goethe’s philosophy, and
as an explanation of modern civilisational decay, this fashionable eschato-
logical work had a profound impact on Kerouac’s writing, and a serious—
though aesthetic and political more than philosophical—effect on
Ginsberg’s. For young men exploring feelings of disaffection with modern
life, with the codes they had been brought up to obey and the futile inner
city frenzy they envisioned around them, Spengler provided historical
coordinates for the present and runes through which to read the future.
Where Nietzsche explained the new post-Enlightenment world their
poetic heroes lived through, Spengler addressed the contemporary scene,
in which questions around the Death of God were mutating into doubts
about the efcacy of humanity itself. This chapter is predominantly an
assessment of that inuence—strongest in Kerouac’s later works Visions of
Cody and Tristessa and in Ginsberg’s poems ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’—and of
its unlikely accommodation with the American Romanticism that was
essential to their writing and to the legend they told and had told about
themselves of a new Renaissance to rival Emerson and Whitman’s a cen-
tury before.
The aim of this chapter is to explore that paradox, one that was touched
on in passing by early Beat scholar John Tytell in the 1970s—of a group
3 JACK KEROUAC, ALLEN GINSBERG AND THEIR TRANSCENDENTALIST GLOOM
64
of young men who pictured themselves protecting the ame lit by
Whitman and Emerson but were enchanted by prophesies predicting the
end of Western civilisation, and a new corrective barbarism that would rise
from its ashes (Tytell 2006). Faith in the human spirit, and in the endless
vistas of opportunity available if we could nurture it properly, was compro-
mised, from the start, by the anti-rationalist impulse that drew Kerouac
and Ginsberg to Spengler. Spengler’s dramatic, crepuscular visions—fuel
for inspired nationalist alarmism and conspiracy theorising from the 1930s
to the present day, and currently undergoing a revival in post-Trump Alt
Right America—were also among the building blocks of a movement that
was supposed to revolutionise human consciousness on a global scale.
John Lardas, in The Bop Apocalypse (2001), and Robert Inchausti, in
Hard to be a Saint in the City (2017), have enlisted this interest in Spengler
as evidence of the Beats’ serious intellectual and spiritual credentials—a
rebuttal to critics who have dismissed the group as hedonistic and lacking
in rigour. In keeping with so much Beat scholarship, however, these useful
studies are protective of the movement’s progressivism and pay little atten-
tion to Spengler’s counter-intuitive impact on Kerouac and Ginsberg’s
arguments for spiritual perfectibility. What I’m arguing is that such protec-
tiveness is limiting—both to the writers it’s directed towards and to the
critics who employ it. Indeed, as with any intellectual movement, a full
understanding of the Beats’ ethos and impact in cultural history requires
careful analysis of such contradictions. Signicantly—beyond the bluster
of condescending or outraged opponents in Kerouac and Ginsberg’s
day—John Tytell hinted sensitively at these issues almost half a century
ago, suggesting that the Beats’ profound faith in self—even societal—lib-
eration had been complicated by ‘a Spenglerian expectation of the total
breakdown of Western culture’ (p.9). This chapter aims to explore that
statement, teasing out its implications—negative and positive.
The new vision
Before the literature itself, it is worth concentrating a little more on the
scene that generated the Beat vision, their ‘new vision’ as it was then—in
NewYork between 1943 and 1947—and on how Spengler t into this.
Referred to by Kerouac as his ‘symbolist period’, and also half-seriously as
a time when he was experimenting with ‘all kinds of silly junk, the reper-
tory of modern ideas’, it involved the concerted and feverish combination
of French, German and English aesthetic theories and the application of
G. STEVENSON
65
these to a post-war urban America (2012b, p.245). Both at rst closer to
Lucien Carr than one another, they worked separately with him on mani-
festos for an art that was—like Rimbaud’s poetry, like Nietzsche’s philoso-
phy and like Charles Baudelaire and André Gide’s Symbolist
manifestos—radically liberated from conventional moral responsibility.
5
If its title came from William Butler Yeats—and if Ginsberg in particular
was drawn to Yeats’ spiritualism and his restoration of ‘love’s mansion’ to
the bodily functions—the ‘New Vision’ that emerged in these early Beat
years was an unadulterated homage to the late nineteenth-century French
poets both saw incarnated in Carr.
6
For Ginsberg, newly arrived in
NewYork City from sleepy Patterson, New Jersey, learning the language
of poetry was the same as learning ‘Carr language: fruit, phallus, clitoris,
cacoethes, feces, foetus, womb, Rimbaud’ (2006, p.50). And for Kerouac,
whose recollections of this time are steeped in Rimbaudian allusions,
Carr’s European mystique inspired hope of escape out of the connes of
American bourgeois conformity. The group were, Kerouac writes,
embroiled in their own ‘very nostalgic Seasons of Hell’—and the dream was
to ee an America Lucian dismissed as ‘a pond that’s drying out’ for ‘Paris
on the verge of being liberated’ (2012b, p.206). On the left bank, they
fantasised, their gang could emerge transformed as ‘Symbolist Isidore
Ducesses and Apollinaires and Baudelaires and “Lautréamonts”’ (2012b,
p.209).
Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses is the keynote in accounts by all
three, and his attempt to achieve a higher perspectival plane—one on
which the beautiful co-existed with the horric, and conventional social
taboos were coded squeamish and cowardly. Reclining by the Hudson the
night before they tried and failed to enlist as seamen and sail for this
Symbolist paradise, it was that liberation through amorality that inspired
them. Remembering Claude with fondness but also the gruff lm noir-ish
affectation he adopts throughout Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac describes the
two of them drunk and hollering into the darkness: ‘Plonger au fond du
grouffre, ciel ou enfer, qu’importe? [‘to plunge to the bottom of the abyss,
Heaven or Hell, what matter?’] and all those other Rimbaud sayings, and
Nietzschean’ (p.209).
Eventually, and signicantly, Kerouac and Ginsberg came to interpret
Rimbaud in less decadent terms than Carr’s. The ‘new vision’ Ginsberg
recorded in his diary was based on Rimbaud as a purposive poet—some-
one who had used Nietzsche’s template of the ‘anarchic poetic Dionysiac
archetype individual’ to move beyond earlier Symbolist gestures of ‘evil
3 JACK KEROUAC, ALLEN GINSBERG AND THEIR TRANSCENDENTALIST GLOOM
66
for its own sake’, and ‘art for art’s sake’ (2006, p.121). Where Carr rev-
elled, as we heard from Kerouac, in André Gide’s conception of the act
gratuite, responding to moral embargos on the individual by behaving
without regard for moral consequence, Ginsberg explained his ‘new
vision’ in more positive terms. It involved not only freedom from old
‘false’ moral structures, and lessons learnt from the ‘poetic Dionysiac’
approaches of the n de siècle, but a new ‘highly conscious’ way of seeing.
Not yet nineteen, Ginsberg tried to give pattern and purpose to the thrill
and beauty he foundin Carr’s gratuitous rebellion. ‘The New Vision’, is
about both the ‘acceptance of an unromantic universe of at meaningless-
ness’ and the feeling out of ‘universal motives’ (p.121).
A posturing, self-consciously ambiguous claim—from a young poet in
development—this is also a ashpoint in Beat thinking. It reveals an early
accommodation between nihilistic, realist and romantic approaches that
would underpin their different aesthetics and endure covertly once the
movement was fully formed. If Carr’s positions of art for art’s, and evil for
evil’s sake had been mesmerising when they met in 1943, by 1945—with
Kammerer dead and Carr in prison for his manslaughter—Ginsberg began
to form a humanist response to the horror that resulted from their amoral
games. The ‘new vision’ was now more than just provocation, more than
aiming to épater le bourgeoisie or cure ennui by shocking gesture. It had
evolved into an attempt to use the higher consciousness of intoxication
and of creative inspiration to understand ‘universal motives’ and react
accordingly (p.121). For Ginsberg, the prototype shifted from Rimbaud–
Carr to something between ‘Kerouac … a romantic deluded poet’,
‘Burroughs … a realist, interesting himself in sociology as an entertain-
ment’ and Burroughs’ wife ‘Joan Adams’, whose ‘high consciousness’ led
her to ‘choose to live forsaking ambition and pride’ (p.121).
Originally suspicious of Ginsberg, Kerouac started seeing him as a
better- suited ally than Carr at around the same time. Though he took pot
shots at ‘vain and stupid’ Allen, and found him less fun to be around, he
recognised a philosophical and artistic afnity between them that ran
deeper than with the other two (Kerouac 1999, p.91). In Jack’s thinking,
he and Ginsberg differed from Carr—whose reading of Nietzsche and
Rimbaud led him to desire a superior, nonchalant state of being, ‘a post-
human post-intelligence’ which was also ‘post-soul’—because they used
the same writers to advance rather than deny spiritual conceptions of
humanity (p.81). Rather than beyond human (or beyond good and evil),
the ‘self-ultimacy’ they sought was explicitly, nobly moral—based on the
G. STEVENSON
67
longing for a true or authentic ‘identity in the midst of indistinguishable
chaos, in sprawling nameless reality’ (p.81). They were, as Ginsberg said,
still engaged in the ‘intense investigation of evil’ that their time with Carr
and Burroughs had set in motion.
7
But they combined that with their dif-
ferent literary and political idealisms, and developed it into an approach
that was socially and morally concerned.
Fin de siécLe ToModernisM
Spengler was introduced to that moral but fatalistically grounded scheme
as one of a series of expansive German thinkers from Burroughs’ library. If
Carr provided the n de siècle example in the ‘New Orleans School’
Kerouac mythologised, Burroughs—their ‘great teacher in the night’—
put that in the context of Western civilisational history (Kerouac 2012b,
pp.193, 196). As well as ‘the poetry, the soft city evenings, the cries of
Rimbaud!’, Kerouac writes, the early NewYork Beat scene was dened by
music, literature and meta-historical theory dealing in grand pronounce-
ments on ‘will’, ‘destiny’, and the rise and fall of cultures. From Wagner’s
‘great Gotterdämmerung’ to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and
Goethe’s Faust, Kerouac and Ginsberg were swept up in works passed
down to them by Burroughs and steeped in ‘the mysterious dark endless
Faustian horizon of [the elder man’s] vision’ (2012b, pp.206, 194).
A stickler for ‘facts’ over mysticism and persistently critical of his friends’
romantic inclinations, Burroughs would no doubt have scoffed at this dra-
matic homage.
8
Just as they had built Carr up to be a Rimbaud-like gure
or a fatally beautiful stand-in for Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Kerouac and
Ginsberg read Burroughs’ combination of great intellect with drug addic-
tion and criminality as part of his own pact with Mephisto.
9
As we’ll see,
this in itself has some bearing on their wider thinking on good and evil,
sordidness and beauty, and the peaks and troughs of civilisations. But what
he provided at the early stages of the Beat project was the next step along
from n de siècle thinking—a set of very modernist coordinates by which
to understand the long anthropological history of contemporary art, soci-
ety, politics and economics.
The Faustian picture Kerouac tried to place Burroughs into—and
which Ginsberg also used to describe Kammerer and Carr—was a central
metaphor in Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Spengler’s two volume
tome, container of ‘the grand actuality of Fact’ as Burroughs saw it, diag-
nosed Western civilisation with a terminal illness brought on by
3 JACK KEROUAC, ALLEN GINSBERG AND THEIR TRANSCENDENTALIST GLOOM
68
complacency, sloth, greed and gluttony(Kerouac 2012b, p.196). Once a
thriving centre for the accumulation of wisdom and beauty, like Faust in
Goethe’s masterpiece the West had surrendered its soul in exchange for
supercial false rewards—giving up virtuous motivation and in to the
forces of materialism, mass rule and decadence (2012b, p.196). As we’ll
see in the next chapter, Spengler was an aptly ironic starting point for
Burroughs’ reports on his own sordid adventures, and a counter-intuitive
but effective one for his hallucinatory satires on collective human behav-
iour, systems of control and conventional conceptions of sympathy. For
now though, the German’s sweeping theory of everything supported
Burroughs’ increasingly pessimistic view of human nature—developed
during his travels through Europe in the late 1930s andhis experience in
an assortment of strange post-university jobs, and summed up by a story
he had just written with his friend Kells Elvins ‘Twilight’s Last Gleamings’,
a black satire about base human cowardliness on a sinking passenger
ferry (1938).
That pessimism was part of the role of wizened elder Burroughs played
up to within the group—and of his eccentric connection to a smarter,
emotionally reserved modernist past. Born at the start of the First World
War, Burroughs came of age in the 1930s rather than Kerouac and
Ginsberg’s early to mid-1940s. His attitude to literature and his style of
thinking and writing were shaped rst as an undergraduate at Harvard
between 1932 and 1936—where he read Joyce and Kafka and attended
T.S. Eliot’s famous Norton lectures—then as a visitor to Europe, towards
the end of the decade, supported by the trust fund his wealthy family pro-
vided for him. His extra twelve years of experience intrigued and impressed
a then only twenty-one-year old Kerouac, when Kammerer introduced
them in 1943.
Used to Carr’s youthful outbursts and set on replicating the heartfelt
prose of his rst literary love Thomas Wolfe, here Kerouac found an
unappable ‘observer weighted with more irony than the lot of em’—a
‘tall and bespectacled’ gentleman ‘thin in a seersucker suit’, ‘ordinary-
looking’ like Eliot yet a kindred bohemian drop-out and seeker (2012b,
192). The glitch caused by that clash of impressions would serve Burroughs
well when he nally focused on writing full time. In NewYork in the early
1940s though, it enhanced his reputation as a teacher among his new
friends, a man whose real-life encounter with an earlier literary age cor-
roborated the expertise that his reading recommendations implied.
G. STEVENSON